It's like saying that trucks weight more than cars. It's true, but that doesn't stop trucks being useful or usable. It just says, that you shouldn't pretend you are driving a car when your driving a truck.

Many of the other issue's Liz raises are true limitations of iThreads, and indeed, she provides several modules that can be used to make many of these problems less apparent.

But as you rightly point out, Liz's node was written at the time of 5.8.1, which as those of us that have been following along know, was the very worst build for threads problems ever. It was worse than it's predecessor and was very rapidly superseded by 5.8.2 which went a long way to fixing many of the problems it introduced.

Basing your judgment on Liz's post, is like saying "Perl can't do structured data", based on the docs for Perl4--it is wildly out of date.

Since then, there have been several more builds which have each cleaned up outstanding bugs further until, in my estimation, Perl's threads are stable. That is, they (mostly) comply to their "specification".

Note: That does not by any means say:

They are perfect--nothing ever is!

They are the easiest thing in the world to use--their specification unfortunately guarantees that they cannot be!

That they are guaranteed bug-free--but nor is anything else in Perl.

Many of the other issues that Liz raised in that article are non-issues when you stop expecting threads to act like forked processes.

Threads and forks are different.

IMany of the issues Liz raises come directly because ithreads have been design to work in a fork-like manner. Ie. duplicating all existing code and data at the point of thread creation.

Indeed, if this was not done, many of the issues with ithreads--including the perceived need for COW-- would disappear!.

If thread->create( <coderef>, ... ); simply created a new thread running a new interpreter running the coderef supplied, and left the programmer to decide what needed to be loaded into that interpreter and shared with that new interpreter, most of the issues would not exist.

With the greatest respect to Liz, her Things you need to know before programming Perl ithreads has completely undone ithreads because it continues to be used as the derigour reason for not using threads, which means no-one uses them, which means the issues with them never get addressed and little or nothing happens by way of improvement. It's a vicious circle that leads to the next issue.

Using DBI with perl threads is not yet recommended for production environments. For more information see <http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=288022>

Notice how it references the same, out-of-date information.

Indeed, in my (admittedly limited) experience, there is no problem using DBI in conjunction with iThreads provided you only use DBI from one thread only.

And whilst that may seem like a major restriction, in practice, using one thread to take care of your DBI interactions and another thread to maintain your user interface, whether a GUI or HTTP, is a very sane way to structure your application. In fact, even if both Tk and DBI could guarantee thread-safety on all platforms and with all DBs, and all DB interface libraries--which is unlikely to ever be true--I'd still recommend using separate threads for each anyway.

And if there was more demand for them, they quite probably would have been lifted by now. The skills of the p5p guys are certainly up to the task as most of them are not that complicated, but without demand, there is little incentive for the work to happen.

Again, none of that means that iThreads is the perfect api or that I wouldn't like to change things--but then there are many other things in Perl5 that are less than perfect. IO state in globals, the object model, syntax inconsistencies etc., but none of these things prevent Perl being usable in production environments to good effect. It simply means that you have to work within and around them.

I think iThreads, and their restrictions are the same. Work with them and they can greatly simplify many programming problems that are awkward, messy, non-intuitive and a maintenance headache to deal with using the alternatives.

Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.